


softer places

by therinfal



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: F/M, Five Kisses Challenge, Hurt/Comfort, Non-Sexual Intimacy, Touch-Starved
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-05
Updated: 2015-03-05
Packaged: 2018-03-16 12:15:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,729
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3487916
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/therinfal/pseuds/therinfal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The first kiss makes Samson’s breath catch.</p>
            </blockquote>





	softer places

The first kiss makes Samson’s breath catch.  
  
Her lips are warm against his brow, and the heat lingers even after she pulls away. He watches her wring out her hands, shift on her feet, open her mouth to say something only to shake her head and chew on her bottom lip.   
  
“What was that for?” he asks, voice husky and eyes hard enough to make her frown. He asks, like he doesn’t remember the last time someone kissed him, like he doesn’t remember why people bother.  
  
He doesn’t.  
  
“Nothing,” Simone tells him. Her words are a sigh, and she rubs at her forehead with the hand she curled into his shirt only moments before. “Nothing. It was stupid.”  
  
He wants to tell her that it wasn’t, but his tongue doesn’t work. His lips don’t move. He can’t even find the words in the scrambled mess of his head. It’s divine intervention, maybe. The Maker reaching through him to keep her from making another mistake.  
  
She takes one last look at him--a look that shoots right through him, pins him to the wall of his cell, makes him want to claw the skin off of his face--before leaving.  
  
The warmth on his skin doesn’t last as long as he’d like.

\--

He initiates the second kiss.  
  
Gathering her hands in his, Samson struggles to focus on the stillness of her fingers, the strength in them. His own shake horribly. The muscles in them twitch and spasm, making it impossible to grip onto most things, but he finds the will to grip onto her.  
  
He leans in, never once looking at her face, and presses his mouth against her knuckles. They aren’t as broad as his, aren’t as swollen. She has the delicate hands of nobility, and they’re beautiful, for all their soft calluses and pale scars. He swears he can see her blood thrumming through the blue and purple veins visible beneath her skin.   
  
The beat quickens at the feeling of his mouth, and Samson’s grateful exhale is sharp enough to break the kiss.  
  
When he touches her again, it’s his forehead where his lips were just before.

\--

Simone remembers the third kiss as their first.  
  
So does he.  
  
Simone remembers his hands sliding through the bars of his cell. They didn’t shake; there was a confidence in his movements, as if he didn’t remember how to tremble. He reached through until he curled his fingers into the fabric of her shirt. He guided her closer and closer, until her hips rested against the bars and she could see the hunger in his stormy eyes.  
  
Samson remembers the kiss differently. He remembers the curl of her mouth when she stepped away to leave, remembers reaching out without realizing. He remembers pulling her closer and closer, and he remembers the warmth of her breath against his face once she couldn’t get any closer.  
  
She remembers his hesitation; he remembers her lips parting, soft and willing. She remembers him surging forward the rest of the way. He remembers her fingers in his hair and at the back of his neck.   
  
She remembers the low groan that left him and her heart leaping at the sound.  
  
He remembers the heat he felt at her wanting.

-

Simone is half-asleep when she feels the fourth kiss.

Sitting on the stone between Samson’s legs, book in her hands, she dozes on and off as he rubs absent circles into her neck. The knots are terrible, and when he hits one, she winces until the pain melts away. 

“You sit at a desk too much,” he mutters when he finds another. “Has to be bad for your back, looking down like that.”  
  
“I look down all the time,” Simone says through clenched teeth. The tension in her jaw only ebbs once he digs into the flesh with his thumb. “Bull’s the only one I don’t look down at. This is nothing but a few old injuries reminding me that I’ve done stupid shit in my life.”  
  
“This one?”  
  
“Fell off a horse.” She shuts her eyes and focuses on his hands. They’re clammy, but they’re always clammy. What matters is the warmth and the strength in them. “I pushed her too hard because I wanted to show off, and I got launched into a ditch. I deserved it, but I nearly broke my neck.

“That accounts for the ache, but the tension is all me. My entire life might as well be a damnable knot.”

As soon as the words leave her mouth, she feels lips on the nape of her neck. His breath against her skin sends a thrill down her spine, and she grips the edges of her book until her knuckles pulse and gleam white.

When she doesn’t relax, Samson pulls away, but only just. “Shouldn’t have done that, should I?”

“It’s alright,” she replies much too quickly, cringing at her own reaction. “I mean, it was fine. Better than fine. I only--I didn’t know I needed that so much.”

He doesn’t kiss her there again that night, but he doesn’t stop touching her either.  
  
She marks it down as a small victory.

\--

The fifth kiss is one neither of them expected.  
  
Skyhold at night is theirs to explore.   
  
With everyone asleep or close to it, Simone takes to opening Samson’s cell and walking with him. Knowing that there won’t be anyone to hurl obscenities at him and ruin what little time they have together puts him at ease. As much at ease as he can be, at least, walking around at night with the woman he thought he was willing to destroy.  
  
His hands shake less as the months pass, but she still reaches for them when she catches him scratching at his skin, arching a brow when he protests and managing a smile for him when he relents.  
  
“I was never really one for walks,” he says once they reach the garden. “Not really the ‘midnight strolls in a garden’ type, you know.”   
  
Simone chuckles and watches him look up.  
  
Exhaustion is written all over his face. She knows he isn’t sleeping, but neither is she. It makes their walks easier, knowing they aren’t interrupting anything.  
  
“Kirkwall was too bright to see anything anyway.” He ran the tip of his tongue over his thin bottom lip before stealing a look in her direction. Realizing her eyes are already on him, he changes direction again. Back to the sky. Back to the glittering against black. “You’d have to go a mile outside the walls to see a star.”

Simone curls her fingers more tightly around his. “So do you like it up here?”

“No.” He laughs at that, a hoarse sound in his throat that makes her smile. “It’s cold. I’d take Val Royeaux’s shit or Kirkwall’s smoke over snow."  
  
“Charming.”  
  
Samson turns to her and is surprised to see that she’s gotten closer. Her eyes are soft, features shadowed by her mess of black hair, and though he’s kissed her before, he’s never wanted to the way he does then.  
  
“If you want charming, you’ve got the wrong man.”

The corner of her mouth twitches. 

“I don’t want charming,” she murmurs. “I’ve dealt with charming all my life. I want you. I’m tired of this… being accident after accident and nothing more.”  
  
“More?”  
  
Simone nods. She steps even closer, tilting her chin down just enough for the tip of her nose to bump against his. “More.” Whatever higher power drove him to silence the first time he felt her mouth falls away in pieces at her word. “More, Samson. More of anything you can give me.”  
  
“Don’t know how much I can give you.” He sighs, frustrated at his reluctance, and his breath turns to smoke in the air. It dissipates just as quickly as the silence. “The healers keep talking about irreparable damage, which doesn’t surprise me. Still fucking stings, though. You know… you never expect to come back from something like that. You don’t want to. Then you do and it’s too late and you’re left with soup for organs.”

Simone shakes her head at that. Her hand comes loose from his, and she lifts it to his face, thumb brushing over the coarse stubble on his jaw. “I’ve seen what magic can do,” she tells him. “Once Vivienne returns from Montsimmard, I’ll have her see to you.”

Her confidence is strong enough for his cynicism to waver momentarily, and in that moment, she catches a yearning in his eyes that hits her as if it was running.

“The Grand Enchanter? ‘See to’ the templar ass who followed Corypheus?”

“The Grand Enchanter,” Simone says, her voice plain as her thumb reaches his bottom lip. “See to the idiot who just wanted to redeem himself, who Corypheus manipulated into supporting him, who may be the key to helping countless men and women recover from red lyrium.”

Samson smiles at that despite himself. “You make it sound so grand. Like I fell from grace rather than told it to fuck off.”

“Details.” Simone purses her lips, presses her thumb to his, and inches forward. Barely enough to notice “You keep changing the subject. We’re standing too close for you to keep doing that for much longer.”

“I think you’d be surprised,” he says, or she assumes he says, his mouth barely moving due to her thumb holding it closed.

She pulls her hand away, and before he can say a word, she kisses him.

She tilts her head, parts her lips, and she kisses him. Her hands slide into his hair, guiding his face closer, tilting his head in the opposite direction. She kisses him like she’s threatening to consume him. And in a way, she does.

And in a way, he feels forgiven. In a way, he feels lighter.

So he kisses her back. He curls his arms tight around her waist and opens his mouth and takes everything she’s willing to give him. Because maybe he’s dying. Or maybe he’ll see fifty. Or maybe what they have will gutter out like a flame. Or maybe this will last longer than anything in his life has.

All he knows is that the air around them is cold, and she is warm, and her mouth is the sort of gift he doesn’t deserve, but one he is willing to accept.

 


End file.
